— SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, the towering launch vehicle known for its boosters’ aerial acrobatics and synchronized landings when returning to Earth, took to the skies Sunday, delivering national security payloads to orbit for the US military. The mission, called USSF-67, took off at 5:56 p.m. ET from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, marking the fifth successful flight of the rocket recently dethroned as the world’s most powerful operational launch vehicle. This mission was initially advertised to launch on Saturday, and the reason for the one-day delay was not immediately clear. The Falcon Heavy debuted to much fanfare in 2018 when SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attached his personal Tesla Roadster as a test payload on the launch. The car is still in space, taking an oblong path around the sun that swings out as far as Mars’ orbital path. The rocket followed up that test mission with two launches in 2019 before taking a three-year hiatus; the vast majority of SpaceX’s missions don’t require the Falcon Heavy’s amped-up power. On the other hand, SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket launched more than 60 times in 2022 alone, sending two groups of astronauts to space as well as Starlink satellites and a variety of other spacecraft. But SpaceX is now making good on lucrative military launch contracts it signed for the Falcon Heavy years ago. The rocket returned to flight in November with the launch of the US military’s USSF-44 mission, and Sunday’s liftoff was a follow-up to that display. “USSF-44 included six payloads on one satellite that advance communications, space weather sensing, and other technologies into near-geosynchronous orbits,” according to the military’s Space Operations Command. And USSF-67 will make use of the same type of spacecraft deployed on USSF-44, called LDPE, which is essentially a bus for outer space that can carry smaller satellites. The Falcon Heavy also carried a communications satellite, called the Continuous Broadcast Augmenting SATCOM, for the US Space Force. Additional details about the satellites on Sunday’s mission were not immediately available. With each launch, the Falcon Heavy rocket puts on a dramatic show back on Earth. A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launches on its mission with a classified payload for the U.S. Space Force at Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., November 1, 2022. REUTERS/Steve Nesius Steve Nesius/Reuters